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Mapping Your Way to a Successful Hunting Season
Knowing your way around a property will give you a great advantage in determining where to hang your tree stands for the upcoming hunting season. Having a map of food sources, bedding areas and possible travel routes between will help you visualize how deer will move from one area to the next. Obviously having scouting cameras and observing deer movement trumps any map recon, but having a good map is where I like to start.
I like to use Google Earth Pro for all my mapping needs. The best part about using Google Earth Pro is that it’s FREE. We recently leased a property in Nebraska and we recently walked the property to see what was available for the deer in that area. I started by mapping the property boundaries using the polygon tool (see arrow below).
The default settings for drawing a polygon is solid white, so I like to click on the “Style, Color” tab within the new polygon window and change the area to “Outlined.” This allows me to see the aerial photo beneath the shape that I’m drawing. You can also change the name of the shape at this time.
When drawing the shape, use the cross hairs to identify the points along the edge of the shape. When you are on the final point, simply click “OK” to finish the polygon.
You can then add labels to shapes using the “Add Place Mark” icon.
Within the shapes, you can place a label without an icon by clicking on “No Icon.”
Here is a polished version of the map I’m working on:
The great part about drawing shapes in Google Earth is that there is website that allows you to calculate the acreage of any shape using the area calculator. Here is the link to that website. Simply right click on the polygon you wish to calculate area on, select copy, then paste it into the box on the website. I normally hit “View on Webpage” but you also have the option to view in Google Earth or export to Excel.
The area calculator comes in handy when you are planting food plots and you need to know how much seed to have available. A good rule of thumb if you can’t use this tool is that one football field (including the end zone) is equal to one acre.
-Tim Neuman, Wildlife Biologist
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